adjust the lens, look close. Tell us what you see.

I am so tired of waiting. Aren't you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two— And see what worms are eating At the rind.

At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School.  Photograph by Skeet McAuley.

Reasons to Survive November Tony Hoagland November like a train wreck— as if a locomotive made of cold had hurtled out of Canada and crashed into a million trees, flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire. The sky is a thick, cold gauze— but there's a soup special at the Waffle House downtown, and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum, full of luminous red barns. —Or maybe I'll visit beautiful Donna, the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe, and roll around in her foldout bed. I know there are some people out there who think I am supposed to end up                 in a room by myself with a gun and a bottle full of hate, a locked door and my slack mouth open           like a disconnected phone. But I hate those people back from the core of my donkey soul and the hatred makes me strong and my survival is their failure, and my happiness would kill them so I shove joy like a knife into my own heart over and over and I force myself toward pleasure, and I love this November life where I run like a train deeper and deeper into the land of my enemies.

The Wild Geese Wendell Berry Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer's end. In time's maze over fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed's marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

Trying to Have Something Left Over Jack Gilbert There was a great tenderness to the sadness when I would go there. She knew how much I loved my wife and that we had no future. We were like casualties helping each other as we waited for the end. Now I wonder if we understood how happy those Danish afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk. Often I took care of the baby while she did housework. Changing him and making him laugh. I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost.

Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg

Narrative: Ali         a poem in twelve rounds Elizabeth Alexander 1. My head so big they had to pry me out. I’m sorry Bird (is what I call my mother). Cassius Marcellus Clay, Muhammad Ali; you can say my name in any language, any continent: Ali. 2. Two photographs of Emmett Till, born my year, on my birthday. One, he’s smiling, happy, and the other one is after. His mother did the bold thing, kept the casket open, made the thousands look upon his bulging eyes, his twisted neck, her lynched black boy. I couldn’t sleep for thinking, Emmett Till. One day I went Down to the train tracks, found some iron shoe-shine rests and planted them between the ties and waited for a train to come, and watched the train derail, and ran, and after that I slept at night. 3. I need to train around people, hear them talk, talk back. I need to hear the traffic, see people in the barbershop, people getting shoe shines, talking, hear them talk, talk back. 4. Bottom line: Olympic gold can’t buy a black man a Louisville hamburger in nineteen-sixty. Wasn’t even real gold. I watched the river drag the ribbon down, red, white, and blue. 5. Laying on the bed, praying for a wife, in walk Sonji Roi. Pretty little shape. Do you like chop suey? Can I wash your hair underneath that wig? Lay on the bed, Girl. Lie with me. Shake to the east, to the north, south, west— but remember, remember, I need a Muslim wife. So Quit using lipstick. Quit your boogaloo. Cover up your knees like a Muslim wife, religion, religion, a Muslim wife. Eleven months with Sonji, first woman I loved. 6. There’s not too many days that pass that I don’t think of how it started, but I know no Great White Hope can beat a true black champ. Jerry Quarry could have been a movie star, a millionaire, a senator, a president— he only had to do one thing, is whip me, but he can’t. 7. Dressing-Room Visitor He opened up his shirt: “KKK” cut in his chest. He dropped his trousers: latticed scars where testicles should be, His face bewildered, frozen in the Alabama woods that night in 1966 when they left him for dead, his testicles in a Dixie cup. You a warning, they told him, to smart-mouth, sassy-acting niggers, meaning niggers still alive, meaning any nigger, meaning niggers like me. 8. Training Unsweetened grapefruit juice will melt my stomach down. Don’t drive if you can walk, don’t walk if you can run. I add a mile each day and run in eight-pound boots. My knuckles sometimes burst the glove. I let dead skin build up, and then I peel it, let it scar, so I don’t bleed as much. My bones absorb the shock. I train in three-minute spurts, like rounds: three rounds big bag, three speed bag, three jump rope, one- minute breaks, no more, no less. Am I too old? Eat only kosher meat. Eat cabbage, carrots, beets, and watch the weight come down: two-thirty, two-twenty, two-ten, two-oh-nine. 9. Will I go like Kid Paret, a fractured skull, a ten-day sleep, dreaming alligators, pork chops, saxophones, slow grinds, funk, fishbowls, lightbulbs, bats, typewriters, tuning forks, funk clocks, red rubber ball, what you see in that lifetime knockout minute on the cusp? You could be let go, you could be snatched back. 10. Rumble in the Jungle Ali boma ye, Ali boma ye, means kill him, Ali, which is different from a whupping which is what I give, but I lead them chanting anyway, Ali boma ye, because here in Africa black people fly planes and run countries. I’m still making up for the foolishness I said when I was Clay from Louisville, where I learned Africans live naked in straw huts eating tiger meat, grunting and grinning, swinging from vines, pounding their chests— I pound my chest but of my own accord. 11. I said to Joe Frazier, first thing, get a good house in case you get crippled so you and your family can sleep somewhere. Always keep one good Cadillac. And watch how you dress with that cowboy hat, pink suits, white shoes— that’s how pimps dress, or kids, and you a champ, or wish you were, ‘cause I can whip you in the ring or whip you in the street. Now back to clothes, wear dark clothes, suits, black suits, like you the best at what you do, like you President of the World. Dress like that. Put them yellow pants away. We dinosaurs gotta look good, gotta sound good, gotta be good, the greatest, that’s what I told Joe Frazier, and he said to me, we both bad niggers. We don’t do no crawlin’. 12. They called me “the fistic pariah.” They said I didn’t love my country, called me a race-hater, called me out of my name, waited for me to come out on a stretcher, shot at me, hexed me, cursed me, wished me all manner of ill will, told me I was finished. Here I am, like the song says, come and take me, “The People’s Champ,” myself, Muhammad.

For a Long Time I Have Wanted to Write a Happy Poem Richard Jackson     Between two worlds life hovers like a star.     —Byron     for Tomaz It is not so easy to live on the earth as an angel, to imitate the insects that dance around the moon, to return what air we borrow every few seconds. I am going to enter the hour when wind dreamt of a light dress to stroke, when water dreamt of the lips it would meet. The famous Pascalian worm will just have to find another heart to eat. I will reveal the actual reason birds fly off so suddenly from telephone wires. The road will ask my foot for help. The lightning will forget its thunder. I will discover the hidden planet to account for Pluto's eccentric orbit. Pluto, of course, is ready to leave the alliance. I learned this from a recent Scientific American. No longer will I have to lament the death of Mary, the circus elephant, hung with chains from a derrick on Sept. 16, 1916, in Erwin, Tennessee, to punish her immortal soul for brushing her keeper to death. She looks out from her daguerreotype as if she knows one day we too will hear the stars gnaw away at our darkness. It is not so easy. One day I will free the clouds frozen in ponds. No longer will the wind lose its way. I will start hearing important voices like a real saint. The emir of Kuwait will answer my call. If I am not careful I will loosen the noose of history from around my own neck. Just to keep sane I will have to include my weight which is the only thing that keeps me from being a bird. Walking on air will no longer be a problem. Meanwhile, the Hubble telescope is still wobbling its pictures from outer space so we will have to rely on imagination a little longer to see clearly. Why don't windows tell us everything they see? Here come the characters of my sad poems. They have been standing in line to get in like fans for a rock concert. They are gathering around Beatrix Potter who spent 30 years locked in her room. The maid brings up her supper. She sneaks out into the garden to capture small animals to draw or reinvent before they die. Beatrix, I say, we no longer have to kill what we see. I know this in my heart, in my wolf, in my owl. In the Siena of my palms. The Bergamo of my head. In the garlic of my fingers. My friends say I use too much. There are never enough streets crossing the one we are stuck on. No one wants to be a cloud anymore. Who still believes in the transmigration of souls? If you believe Bell's theorem, then the fact is that the squirrel falling out of my tree this morning makes minute subatomic changes from here to Australia. Will I have to put on my pants differently now? Just when we start to believe in moonlight we notice how many stars it erases. It is not easy. I am going to come back as the birthmark on the inside of your thigh, between your dreams of angels and solar dust, between your drunken skirt and the one that laughs. I am going to learn what the butterfly knows about disguise, what so astonishes the hills. All this is going to take constant vigilance. In The Last Chance Saloon, Tombstone, Arizona, I saw the lizard creature with its glued head, almost human, tilted up from under the glass, as if it didn't know which world to claim. Apparently it fooled a lot of people in 1872. I kept thinking if only Ovid had seen this creature he would have known his nymphs could never escape just by turning into trees. In Dora Noar, Afghanistan, the young soldier, Mohammad Anwar, age 13, believes he will turn into a desert flower when he dies in the jihad. The barrel of his AK-47 is sawed down because he is as small as the four prisoners he has returned with. They understand that all we know of the sky we learn by listening to roots. I was happy, he says after shooting them against a wall, over and over again. I was happy. Happy. Now maybe the earth will want to change its name. It won't want to be the earth anymore. Shadows will be abandoned by their objects. The light will squander itself on the flowers because they do not even want to be flowers anymore. It is not easy to live on this earth. We don't understand that the universe is blowing away from us like litter, but at an incredible speed. There is a new theory that the universe is left-handed. It has to do with the spin of quarks. Someone else says it's in the form of a horseshoe. The rest of the animal is metamorphosed into a black hole. I happen to side with the fanatics who believe it is following the call of a mythic bird too distant to see, but this is only poetry, like the old papers the homeless use to stuff their clothes on cold nights, the kind of poetry that says, Flowers, be happy, trees, raise your drooping eyebrows, sky, don't turn your back on us again, my love, how wonderful to have lived while you lived, which is not the sort of poetry you read anyplace anymore.

Switching to deer time Bob Hicok Three deer on the nearby hill and maybe more on the farby hill and probably every hill in this place of hills had deer on it eating the gray-green grass of December in the early light. How I decide to get out of bed these days is deer. If I look out my window and see them I know it's time to feed my feet to the mouths of my jeans and when I told my wife the deer are my new clock she said they won't fit on the mantle. The clock of three deer watched me walk down the drive to get the paper but I was alone at the bottom of the hill when I read there were twenty thousand dead in Iran from a quake. Yesterday it was twelve thousand dead and the day before ten thousand dead and I sensed a pattern. In the cold sensed a pattern, with mittens on sensed a pattern and coming back into view of the clock of three deer I waved and shouted I have sensed a pattern. Of course they were intuitively aware of this pattern, that everything which eats also hunts and everything that hunts is also eaten, including the buckling Earth, including my mittens and the mist rising from my mouth, the white husk of breath, of course they ran from my voice into woods from which I later heard the pop of shotguns, which sound soft from afar like champagne being opened but loud from near like flesh being opened. It was just after the song of champagne began that I thought, right now, this instant, precisely as I put the corner of this toast into my mouth, a boy, a girl sits on the rubble of his former roof, her one time wall and holds the hand of his buried mother, the foot of her crushed father, not because I am sentimental did I think this though I am but because twenty thousand dead means every sorrow we can imagine and every sorrow we can't has occurred. And deer are the best clocks because time is twitchy, is a nervous thing running away from us into woods, into its own death and I don't like wrist watches, have never worn one, don't like cuckoos, all birds should fly, don't like Big Ben because people were tortured in that tower, time is politics of the worst sort, is who controls the numbers and it isn't me, is never you and just three days ago the clock of the ground struck the hour of twenty thousand deaths and tomorrow the paper will say otherwise, will say more and if I look into the brown eyes of deer there is no time, no feeling except peace, which isn't real but neither I sometimes hope are we.

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range. In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields, dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats. All summer you mowed the grass in the meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine clacketing beside, while the sun walked high in the morning; and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres, gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack, and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn, three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning. Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns. Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass. When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze, one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning, led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond, and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin, and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear, and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave, shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you, where by next summer a dent in the ground make your monument. For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

Before the Sky Darkens Stephen Dunn Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus of melancholy-maybe these are the Saturday night-events to take your best girl to. At least then there might be moments of vanishing beauty before the sky darkens, and the expectation of happiness would hardly exist and therefore might be possible. More and more you learn to live with the unacceptable. You sense the ever-hidden God retreating even farther, terrified or embarrassed. You might as well be a clown, big silly clothes, no evidence of desire. That’s how you feel, say, on a Tuesday. Then out of the daily wreckage comes an invitation with your name on it. Or more likely; that best girl of yours offers you, once again, a small local kindness. You open your windows to good air blowing in from who knows where, which you gulp and deeply inhale as if you have a death sentence. You have. All your life, it seems, you’ve been appealing it Night sweats and useless stratagem. Reprieves.

Dog Weather Stephen Dunn Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up. The paper boy's papers came apart in the wind. Now, nothing human moving. Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart in The Caine Mutiny. My breath chalks the window, gives me away to myself. I like the intelligibility of old songs. I prefer yesterday. Cars pass, the asphalt's on its back smudged with skid. It's potholed and cracked; it's no damn good. Anyone out without the excuse of a dog should be handcuffed and searched for loneliness. My hair is thinning. I feel like tossing the wind a stick. The promised snow has arrived, heavy, wet. I remember the blizzard of... People I don't want to be speak like that. I close my eyes and one of my many unborn sons makes a snowball and lofts it at an unborn friend. They've sent me an AARP card. I'm on their list. I can be discounted now almost anywhere.

You’ve stopped whispering and are asleep.  I go on listening to apples drop in the grass beyond the window.  Earlier we tried to guess each fall’s moment, but neither kept up that little game of hope or fear for long.  Now your weight against me is like . . . I was about to say like no other, unmistakably human, my son’s.  But, truth is, you’re simply heft.  Burden like, say, grain, your body brings my body pain, your shoulders, knees, elbows, hands, lumpy like sacked fruit, and whatever concord is actual between us is not easily meant, but is so only by our diligence. I recall a far season of flowers when, for love, I crept to the edge of a roof to reach a petal-decked branch. It snapped, I dropped, screaming down sky and flowering.  My father yelled my name, ran out to find me sprawled, dazed, gripping his crushed gift, thrust at him in my bloody fist. He plunges below us now, as we fall soundless toward him, our bodies crowded on your narrow bed, my arm and leg gone numb, your torso wedged between the wall and me. You sleep uncomfortably, though comforted by my presence, for which you cry some nights, and which you, such nights, endure. Where did you, so young, learn such sacrifice?  Now I no longer hear the apples fall.  But how they go!  Incessantly, though with no noise, no blunt announcements of their gravity. See! There is no bottom to the night, no end to our descent. We suffer each other to have each other a while.

There is no longer any reason to distrust us. When it leaves it will leave like summer, and we will remember it as a break in something that had seemed as unrelenting as coming rain and we will be sorry to see it go.

the mockingbird had been following the cat all summer mocking mocking mocking teasing and cocksure; the cat crawled under rockers on porches tail flashing and said something angry to the mockingbird which I didn't understand. yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway with the mockingbird alive in its mouth, wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping, feathers parted like a woman's legs, and the bird was no longer mocking, it was asking, it was praying but the cat striding down through centuries would not listen. I saw it crawl under a yellow car with the bird to bargain it to another place. summer was over.